It is believed that the great migration happened somewhere around 50,000 years ago during the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition. Modern humans were born leading to the explosion of new tools, new cultures, arts and artifacts (Collins 2017). Consequently, the population increased in Africa leading to migration into other continents.
One of the cultural capabilities that humans hold which can be of great help to paleoanthropologists is the assimilation of new cultures. As Collins explains, as migration increased, it bridged the socialization gap, leading to exchange of ideas and eventually, adoption of new cultures from other communities. It takes only a few generations to completely wipe out an old culture and replace it with a new one. Referencing the work of Kolodny, Collins explains assimilation to be the main reason behind the Neanderthals disappearance. As modern humans migrated from Africa, they carried with them advanced technologies compared to the Neanderthals. They could not catch up with those technologies and consequently got either assimilated or wiped out.
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Additionally, human beings have the ability to develop new cultures based on adapting to new environments or climate changes. When the population in Africa increased, some of the humans were forced to migrate to other continents, thanks to them developing an ability to communicate. They were able to gather and come up with plans on how to migrate. The groups that migrated to different continents developed new cultures based on the environmental and climatic conditions they found in those continents.
Referencing the work of Creanza, Kolodny, and Feldman (2015), Collins explains three ways through which culture could have evolved. First, ideas developed from lucky observations such as witnessing of a mouse getting trapped by a mesh of grass which could have led to the invention of hunting nets. Secondly, development or combination of existing ideas, and thirdly, loss of ideas.
Essentially, he states that for all developed ideas to last there must be a steady flow of new brains to keep those ideas and cultures alive. A lack of new brains consequentially leads to the end of cultures. However, those cultures or innovations that promote population growth could have lasting effects, since an increase in population could buoy a disproportionate upsurge in innovation.
Reference
Collins, N. (2017, May 4). How Migration and other Population Dynamics could have Shaped Early Human Culture. Retrieved from https://news.stanford.edu/2017/05/02/early-culture-shaped-by-migration
